Design’s next era is about making people feel seen

Alison Rand is a strategist, author, and design leader working at the intersection of design strategy, organizational structure, and operations. A former developer who helped build early UX practices at agencies like Huge and Hot Studio, she now consults with organizations to untangle complexity—how people work, how decisions travel, and how culture is shaped through structure. She is pursuing a master’s degree in Strategic Foresight at the University of Houston, co-founded Forty Fifty, a social health platform for women navigating midlife, and is the author of Sentido with MIT Press.

In her interview with Doreen Lorenzo, Alison explores what it means to lead creative teams inside systems that weren’t built with you in mind. She discusses adversity as a professional superpower, why representation and emotional labor are core design concerns, and how systems thinking and foresight can help designers meet AI with sharper judgment, intuition, and responsibility for the futures they’re shaping.

Fast Company: Tell us about your career path? When did you realize you were interested in design?

Alison Rand: My path is meandering. I studied art history, wanting to be a fresco restorer. That was my dream. But when I graduated, my father said, “Happy Independence Day.” And I was like, “Oh my God, I have to get a job.”

I ended up getting a job at IBM as a secretary and landed in their intranet department with everybody who was my age. I fell into that dot-com life; I learned how to code, I became a developer, a front-end programmer. But I always had my foundational fine art background. That was how I was raised: the love and passion for creativity.

On my career path, I feel like I tripped and fell in so many directions. But in hindsight, I realized I also took advantage of the things presented to me and made intentional decisions, such as landing at Huge and learning about user experience for the first time, and then landing at Hot Studio as employee number one in their New York office and learning more about human-centered design. I always had so much curiosity about so many different things and so much passion for relationships and humans, so it was unintentionally intentional.

What is your recent book Sentido about?

Sentido is a Spanish word that means sense but is multilayered––sense, meaning, direction, awareness. That word has always been a guiding light for me. Sentido is part personal story, part leadership field guide. It’s about navigating systems that weren’t built with you in mind, which is true for so many people, especially women. There are additional intersections—it’s about intuition, identity, power. 

It’s part feminist manifesto and about the emotional work behind leading creative teams. The goal of Sentido was to key into non-traditional thinkers, doers, and makers. The thesis of it was to understand that organic intelligence is an incredibly undervalued skill, but equally—if not more—important than academic intelligence.

In the book you talk about how adversity shapes a person professionally. What are some of the personal stories or experiences that shaped you?

It was difficult to write the book for me because I needed to unpack my own personal journey and a lot of that adversity. I was raised in New York City in the ‘70 and ‘80s. My mother was Puerto Rican, my father was Jewish. I was raised in what felt like a safe space because it was such a multicultural environment that I never knew was anything other. 

But I always knew that my father’s family didn’t talk to him because he married my mother. And there were always these undercurrents of “less than” or “not enough.” When we would go to Puerto Rico, I didn’t quite fit in there, but I loved it. I was always living in the in-between. I always felt really proud of that. Navigating a lot of life difficulties—my parents getting divorced, moving to Puerto Rico—was really challenging, and yet it changed me.

Then my mom died when I was 16. I lived with her being sick for many years, just the two of us. That was a crucible moment for me in terms of adversity and figuring out my path independently. I wasn’t raised with helicopter parents, although my mother was a deeply Latina, strong-armed, parent. 

I was a child of the seventies running wild in New York City. I didn’t have a lot of oversight. So when my mom died, that adversity empowered me to work harder, focus, go to college, do all the things I thought I was supposed to do. I was surrounded by so much love through friendships—my chosen family.

But when I moved into professional spaces, I additionally felt isolated, judged, and alone. I didn’t know if it was because I was a woman, because I was ethnic, because I wasn’t the right kind of intelligent, or because I didn’t have enough accolades. I just felt like I was constantly trying to prove myself or swimming upstream. 

It harkened back to the past—I was seen enough to get to this place, but now I wasn’t good enough. I learned that adversity can be a superpower. It took me a long time to realize that all of those things are really valuable. That’s me. That’s who I am. That’s how I am. That’s the superpower I bring—all of those experiences.

How do you think all of those experiences have helped you become a better design leader? 

A lot of what all of that instilled in me is a deep compassion for the people around me, especially the people who are less visible. All of the experiences that made me feel a certain way are things I don’t want the people I lead to feel. That ability to read a room, to walk in and say, “This feels weird,” or “This isn’t right,” or to connect dots quickly helps me craft the right teams and say, these people are going to work magic together, and this is the problem that we’re working to solve. These need to be the right people. It’s not a one size fits all model.

My ability to be flexible and understand the people around me has allowed me to curate their experiences and be able to listen and learn what it is that they need so that I can be the facilitator of that. At the end of the day, I believe that the employee experience is directly related to the customer experience.

What is your view on where AI fits in and how it’s influencing design?

I see it in a couple of different ways. Design has brought clarity, empathy, and user centricity into conversations that used to be purely operational in a lot of ways. I had hoped that design would be more infused in business because yes, design is a process and a practice, but it is also a way of working and a way of thinking. In the same way I keep getting relegated to this “niche” design operation space, I feel as though operations and strategy would naturally be better served if we applied design minds to them.

Where it sometimes failed, design was not evolving fast enough—staying focused on that immediate experience without considering long-term systems or future states. I think the next decade of design has to be much more strategic, more anticipatory, and far less reactive, because I think AI will handle the repeatable parts of design. 

What it won’t replace is that strategic sense—making, understanding, context, ethics, meaning, culture, longer term impact. Designers should lean more into behavioral psychology or even cognitive neuroscience, and foresight, scanning the environment, connecting disparate signals, understanding weak signals, and shaping products in ecosystems in ways AI can’t predict—and then understanding the ways in which humans will respond to it all. That intersection would be really powerful.

How will systems thinking help us navigate this new reality? 

When I talk to teams or think about systems, I try to pull people out of the mindset that they’re designing for isolated features or screens or whatever it may be. To me, design has always been closer to ecology than engineering. 

Everything we build sits inside a larger environment of people, culture, incentives, past, present, future power. If you’ve ever spent time in a forest, or even just paid attention to a block in New York City, you know that everything is in relationship. I often use living systems as my reference point because they make an idea tangible.

It’s that mutualism and that interdependence, like in nature—if you uncover one part of the ecosystem, something else will respond. It might show up immediately or have a slow ripple effect. Organizations or organisms behave the same way. 

You change a workflow, you shift a metric, you make a design decision, and it impacts people across the board, upstream, downstream, emotionally, culturally. If you’re not thinking about those, systems thinking shifts design from making to understanding.

In today’s context, it means recognizing that every design decision has downstream consequences. We’ve seen the effects of this already through the pandemic and we know these things. However, we still get caught up in the very current state rabbit hole. 

I try to advocate for teams to take that step back and see the bigger picture of what we are actually trying to shift. What’s changing in the surrounding landscape? What futures are we unintentionally building towards? Who’s not involved in this conversation and who should be? 

Pausing and asking the right questions and seeing the forest and the trees can allow us to anticipate and make better decisions in the present and for the future. That’s the most important part of it—getting out of the state of only designing for the present.

How should designers be thinking about representation in their work?

AR: Representation is integral to the work that designers do. I actually think that’s been a big part of a failure in design when there were all these conversations about, is design thinking canceled? Part of that was because there wasn’t enough representation. There were many times in my career where we would walk into rooms to present things to clients and I would be surrounded by a group of people who were exactly the same. I would say, how are we solving anybody’s problem when everybody who should be at the table is not here?

Design shapes the conditions of life at scale, which means representation isn’t optional. It’s our responsibility to ask who is centered, who isn’t, and who’s paying the cost of the decision. That’s true across design, product design, organizational design, and even how we build our experiences with one another. If the people at the table don’t reflect the people who will be impacted, you’re designing blind spots into the system. Representation is a design choice every time. It has to be intentionally thought of.

What’s your advice to people entering the design field today?  

I’m such a proponent of lived experience. Be intentional, be curious, be thoughtful because that might allow you to pause and consider the additional skills that you have that you could bring to the table, not just this degree you got that says you could do it.